Charles Ditmas, Clock Keeper, Dies at 91

Charles Ditmas, the honorary keeper of clocks at Harvard University, who believed that each antique clock had a personality as distinct as the one he so assiduously cultivated for himself -- with his jet-black dyed hair, Edwardian sartorial style and cherished black bag of ancient tools -- died on Dec. 28 in Boston.

He was 91, although for years he had claimed to be 110, an odd turn for a man obsessed with the precise measure of time.

Since he was appointed in the mid-1940's, his mission was to take care of the 70 or so antique clocks on an honorarium, then bill the university for his services, clock by clock. He sometimes worked without pay, said Sandra Grindlay, who, as curator of the university's portrait collection, frequently worked with him.

"For the most part, he looked after the clocks because he loved them," Ms. Grindlay said.

She said Mr. Ditmas seemed to have been the only official keeper of Harvard's clocks since Simon Willard, the clockmaker, did the job in the last part of the 18th century and the first part of the 19th. During the interregnum, Harvard's clocks were fixed anonymously, as they have been since Mr. Ditmas gradually stopped working in the 1990's.

He continued to visit his beloved timepieces, however.

"Clocks are people and old clocks are very old people," he wrote in an essay in 1975. "Such a demand for patience, quiet acceptance of their quirks, and then, the task of gently coaxing from them better behavior! Sometimes, when I have finished, I feel as old as the clock itself."

He adored the way clockmakers sometimes placed delicate surprises in the workings of a clock: in one Harvard timepiece, he discovered a tiny brass horse one and a quarter inches long, with a boy on its back. It gallops when the clock strikes.

Of such a discovery, he wrote, "It reminds me of gothic cathedrals, where beautiful details are hidden out of sight."

In other clocks, the show is showy. One of the valuable clocks donated to Harvard by Grenville L. Winthrop, class of 1886, was made in Germany and hourly enacts a scene from the Old Testament. In the arch of the dial, a tin Abraham raises his knife to sacrifice his son Isaac, who kicks and wiggles his arms and legs.

On the hour, clouds part at the top of the arch and the hand of God comes out and makes a sign of benediction. Abraham does not strike, and then several trees part to reveal a holy lamb with a nodding head and a wagging tail.

As the last strokes of the hour sound, the trees move back into place, God's hand withdraws, and Abraham and Isaac freeze in position for the next 59 minutes.

Mr. Ditmas delighted in finding traces left by horologists long ago, like globs of tallow from craftsmen's candles in the bottom of clocks.

What he could not countenance were electric clocks. They have no soul, he declared, not to mention having "hideous designs, fake pretensions and vulgar proportions."

That was not all. "They are lacking of tongue, for they never speak to us, lacking the fine lines and good designs and functional qualities," he wrote.

Charles Addison Ditmas Jr. was born on his family's farm in Fairport, N.Y. He liked to tell about being placed as a baby in an 18th-century grandfather clock made by his great-great-grandfather. He said it was a family tradition.

He graduated from the University of Rochester, where he studied fine arts, as well as piano and organ and conducting at the University's Eastman School of Music. He began working toward his doctorate in fine arts at Harvard, but left to join the Army Air Corps in World War II.

While serving in Florida, he contracted spinal meningitis, and returned to Harvard. He began carving wood, hooking rugs and repairing clocks to rehabilitate his hands. The illness turned his hair prematurely gray, so for the rest of his life he dyed it black.

While tutoring the children of a Boston family, he offered to have their grandfather clock fixed. He knew nothing about grandfather clocks, but was told of a master repairman in Watertown, Mass.

"Fix it yourself," the expert said. Mr. Ditmas did, and quickly found himself learning the tricks of a time-honored trade. Two of the trade's precepts: No two clocks are identical. A good clockman must work as if he has all the time in the world.

Mr. Ditmas learned enough to persuade Harvard to hire him to take care of the Winthrop gift in 1943, a job that soon resulted in his appointment as keeper of clocks.

He looked like a practitioner of an antiquarian trade. He favored a long black coat with a fur collar, shirts with collars that had to be put on separately and fine shoes.

And he played his role with relish. He loved to dine at the long table in the faculty club with Harvard's academic lions. He was known to stalk into a seminar, profusely excuse himself and then begin inspecting a clock as if no one were around.

By moving a particularly handsome clock to the campus police headquarters, he secured the ultimate Cambridge status symbol: a permit to park anywhere in Harvard Yard. He continued to drive well into his 80's, at speeds of 5 or 10 miles per hour.

His stepsons, Robert Brent of Arlington, Va., and Joseph Brent of Washington, D.C., remembered how he brought clocks to their Cambridge home to work on them with his antique tools. He would spend the first 20 minutes caressing the clock.

He is also survived by his sister, Esther P. Cross of Fairport. His wife, the former Patricia Herron, died in 1980.

Mr. Ditmas liked to let it drop that he was on a first-name basis with every president of Harvard during his tenure. He loved telling about the clock in the president's office, one made by John Gooding of Plymouth, Mass., in the early 1800's.

"When the dial painter was painting the chapters or numerals," he wrote, "he added a rather realistic depiction of a housefly which has roosted between the I and II for over 150 years and not been shooed away."